It's hard to overestimate the importance of casting in films, and finding the right person for the role, but in this particular case, I don't know if I had a bigger eureka moment than when Julianne Moore auditioned for me for Safe (1995). I had just been getting to know her [on screen]. I had just seen an early advance screening of Short Cuts (1993), but I hadn't seen her work on soap operas like some of my friends did, and didn't really know who she was. She was starting to be discussed as someone who had a bit of buzz in the industry, and then I saw "Short Cuts", and I was sufficiently blown away by her in that. It was an extraordinarily brave performance. But still, this role was so transparent. And I was impressed with how she could make somebody who is that much of a cipher into somebody who you believe is a real person, but not over imbuing it with too much editorializing or second guessing, or kind of winking to the audience. That took a kind of bravery on her part, and an intuition that I never fully appreciated until she was there in the room doing it for me. All of a sudden, it really was a flesh-and-blood person who was speaking these lines, and that felt like a revelation. She said something similar about having read the script saying she was very excited about it, and she had never read something like it.[2014]
